de Roovers

I have learned to tell stories. Because of her I know: stories help. Stories are for the mind what breath is for the lungs. A brother and a sister. The brother is twelve and plays fighting games on the computer, for life and death. He can always become alive again. But his sister, Nour, is sick and has no extra life. She will just make it to her seventh birthday. To distract her, to endure the pain and give meaning to the farewell, the brother tells stories. Nour wants to know what it is like to be ‘grown up’ and so the brother invents a further life for her with his stories. He lets her fly out of the nest, meet a boy, experience a first love, and experience the accompanying rejection. Eventually, he lets her fall asleep in a story with the promise that he will never forget her. Farewell, illness, pain, and death are things we prefer not to speak about, and certainly not with children. That is why we have stories and imagination as a ‘shortcut’, to not have to address these difficult subjects directly, to be allowed to avoid the confrontation, to be allowed to circle around them, and thus playfully reveal and comfort. In a poetic, tactile language, with soft humor, Elvis Peeters and Nicole Van Bael wrote the novella ‘Wat alleen wij weten’. De Roovers make a stage adaptation of it. In search of the right imagination to tell this story, they ended up with the craft of shadow play. Playing with this ancient theater tradition, they try to get a grip on the contradiction of life and death, the transience and the fading of memories. After ‘Twee vrienden’ and ‘Het Verloren Voorwerp’, de Roovers create a new youth performance with ‘Wat alleen wij weten’. The recently graduated illustrator Ona-Lisa Van Haver creates the magical silhouettes and images for the shadow play. Luc Nuyens and Sofie Sente tell and play with the shadows.